Following the operation "Al-Aqsa Flood," the start of the Zionist aggression on Gaza, and the launch of resistance operations against the enemy across the borders, the Lebanese border areas with Occupied Palestine witnessed significant displacement for about a week.
This article was originally published in, translated from the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
Until last Wednesday evening, "12,854 people have been displaced from the border villages, with 2,329 of them leaving their villages in the past three days," according to a report by the International Organization for Migration.
The report confirms the presence of displacement, but the numbers in it may not be entirely accurate, especially with Al-Akhbar sources confirming that about more than two-thirds of the population of the border areas leaving their villages, while the organization referred to "relying on more than 3,600 sources of information ranging from government employees and mukhtars to the displaced themselves."
The International Organization for Migration report did not specify the areas from which the largest number of displaced people left. However, it confined them to the border villages with Occupied Palestine, which extend along a strip of 79 kilometers.
While some districts witnessed complete displacement without moving to safer areas within the district, such as Bint Jbeil, it was noteworthy that Southerners did not leave the southern governorates of Nabatieh and South Lebanon in general, as they preferred to move from "confrontation" villages towards the coast and cities farther from the frontlines, such as Sidon, Nabatieh, and Tyre, where one of its mukhtars told Al-Akhbar that there are no longer apartments available for rent in the city, with a large number of displaced people heading there.
The report also indicated the situation in the Baabda district in Mount Lebanon, where the southern suburbs of Dahieh, the most targeted area in the July 2006 war, were among the areas that witnessed displacement.
The displaced people spread across six governorates, away from the border villages, with the exception of the North (Akkar and North Lebanon), which the report mentioned as "not receiving information from it."
The primary destination for the displaced was Mount Lebanon, with 4,610 displaced persons arriving there; the most significant number of them, 750 people, arrived in the Barja area in the Chouf district from Chaqra, Houla, and Rmeish.
The South governorate came in second place as a destination for the displaced, with 3,209 arriving there, as a significant number of Southerners chose not to leave the South for several reasons, most notably "not wanting to leave their homes and the inability to afford the high rent costs in more distant areas such as Al-Jabal and Beirut."
Most of them concentrated in the city of Tyre and the surrounding areas, with 1,000 displaced people arriving there.
In Beirut, 2,187 displaced people arrived, most of them from the villages of the Shebaa area, and they settled in Al-Mazraa, according to the report of the International Organization for Migration; 1,018 displaced people arrived in the Baalbek-Hermel governorate, 1,217 in Nabatieh, and 575 in the Bekaa.